The Power of the Harmoniously Combined

Tag Archives: Magnifying glass

As a kid, I was always curious – always getting into some kind of a trouble, or rather, should I say, adventure? The classroom left me needing more. I wanted to explore the world around me, but the rigidness of school frightened me. I escaped by creating a world, set apart, all my own, in my imagination. This world had certain rules. One of them was: I was always the hero. The other was, I had to fight against something. The last, unbending one was…I always got the girl.

With such an imagination, I was bound to see the world in a much different light than the rest of my classmates, and even my teachers, might. I’m remembering back to one particular day, when I must have been either in, second or third grade, in Chesterfield, Virginia. I had heard that you could take a magnifying glass, and by focusing it just right, you could light things on fire.

Well, as you can imagine, this made my little, pyromaniac-heart, go pitter-patter with gusto. I set out to find whether this was true or not. My first few attempts were utter failure. I had spotted an empty, white cigarette pack, and awkwardly tried to angle my wrist so that the light from the sun would shine on it.

At first, I couldn’t even tell where the light was, how far away the lens needed to be – whether I was too close, or too far away. But I kept at it, and eventually discovered that sweet spot, where you hover delicately – your hand inching in and out just slightly to focus light into a spot. Only my spot looked more like the shape of a fan, or imagine a dot with rays shooting out from one side. And even when I finally managed to get that spot pretty circular – the paper, cardboard of the cigarette pack, still wouldn’t burn – no matter how long I held my hand in place! What a bummer…

As the minutes turned into a half hour or more, I began to see a pattern forming, for, I had given up on the pack for the moment, and wanted to try out my new-found spot producing lens on stuff like leaves and wood and stuff.

I picked up a green leaf and focused the sunlight. Nothing seemed to happen. Next, a piece of grass – still, no change. Finally, I saw a dried up ol’ leaf and experimented on that. Suddenly, something miraculous began to happen before my very eyes: Where the spot of light was focused, I could have sworn that there was a dark circle forming on the leaf! Staring at the spot of light for so long took a toll on my eyes, and so I rubbed them and moved the light away to check. Sure enough, where the sunlight had been, now, was a charred spot a bit smaller than the spot of light that I had used.

Such a small victory; but such a sweet one! I played around more and more, until I came upon this old brown log. Almost immediately, I saw the effects: Yet, this time, something even more amazing happened: After focusing the light for, maybe, oh, 10-15 seconds, I heard this quick little muffled, “poof!”, and a red flame popped into existence, seemingly, right up out of the wood, itself.

Well, I could tell you that I was surprised and delighted, but that wouldn’t even BEGIN to describe how I felt right at that critical moment of discovery.

As a child, I learned a very powerful lesson that day: That energy, focused, can effect things, where normally, no appreciable difference could be detected.

I carry this lesson with me to this very day. As an adult, I still tend to believe as a child. So you could say that I live in a fantasy world; or you could say that I simply have a strong mind and know how to utilize my imagination to the fullest. Either way, what I’ve found to be true, is that a focused mind acts on thoughts nearly the same way that that magnifying glass worked on sunlight. I’ve done a lot of private research on this. Among the sources have been books on the practices of Yogis, martial artists, people who have mastered something of themselves, or a certain craft. I have read a whole fwoplusal (my word, coined for exactly what I was trying to express) of material on the, “Law of Attraction”, numerology, the Tarot, hard sciences, meta-sciences, philosophy and such. But what struck me as the most powerful evidence that any of this be true, was the massive number of wildly successful people who claimed that it was so.